
Michael Douglas
Born: 1944-09-25
Place of Birth: New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Biography
Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is a retired American actor and film producer. He has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the AFI Life Achievement Award. The elder son of Kirk Douglas and Diana Dill, Douglas earned his Bachelor of Arts in drama from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His early acting roles included film, stage, and television productions. Douglas first achieved prominence for his performance in the ABC police procedural television series The Streets of San Francisco, for which he received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations. In 1975, Douglas produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, having acquired the rights to the Ken Kesey novel from his father. The film received critical and popular acclaim and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, earning Douglas his first Oscar as one of the film's producers. Douglas went on to produce films including The China Syndrome (1979) and Romancing the Stone (1984), for which he received the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy, and The Jewel of the Nile (1985). Douglas received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor (a role he reprised in the sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in 2010). Other notable roles include in Fatal Attraction (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Basic Instinct (1992), Falling Down (1993), The American President (1995), The Game (1997), Traffic (2000), and Wonder Boys (2000). In 2013, for his portrayal of Liberace in the HBO film Behind the Candelabra, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. Douglas starred as an ageing acting coach in the Netflix comedy series The Kominsky Method (2018–2021), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best ctor—television series musical or omedy. He has portrayed Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Ant-Man (2015). Douglas has received notice for his humanitarian and political activism. He sits on the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, is an honorary board member of the anti-war grant-making foundation Ploughshares Fund, and he was appointed as a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 1998. He has been married to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones since 2000. In July 2025, Douglas said that he was largely retired from acting, saying "I realized I had to stop [...] I did not want to be one of those people who dropped dead on the set". He added that while he was attached to one additional project and did not fully rule out future projects "if something special came up", he had no plans to work regularly again.
Known For

Avengers: Endgame

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man

Basic Instinct

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Solitary Man

The Game

Unlocked

Romancing the Stone

Michael Douglas: Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival

Traffic

Wall Street

Falling Down

A Perfect Murder

Disclosure

Haywire

Last Vegas

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Coma

Fatal Attraction

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

The Jewel of the Nile

The Sentinel

The Ghost and the Darkness

Don't Say a Word

The War of the Roses

The American President

Black Rain

Looking Through Water

The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers

The China Syndrome

A Chorus Line

Get Bruce!

And So It Goes

Animal World

Beyond the Reach

Running

Hail, Hero!

You, Me and Dupree

Hollywood Banker

Summertree

One Day in September

Shining Through

Sword-and-Sandal: The Story of the Period Epic

TVTV Looks at the Oscars

The In-Laws

Forever Hollywood

Downwind

Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen

America's Burning

Nos Bastidores de Hollywood

Ken San

Behind the Candelabra

Wonder Boys

Napoleon and Samantha

Fog City Mavericks

Hollywood: No Sex, Please!

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Basic Instinct: Sex, Death & Stone

Cast a Giant Shadow

Dinosaurs Alive

Completely Cuckoo

One Night at McCool's

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy

Electric Blue 29

King of California

The Untameable Kirk Douglas

The Earth Day Special

It Runs in the Family

The Star Chamber

Marvel Studios Assembled: The Making of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

It's My Turn

Still Laugh-In: The Stars Celebrate

The Directors: Milos Forman

A Call to Arms

Miloš Forman: What Doesn't Kill You…

It Takes a Lunatic

Trumbo

Forman vs. Forman

Black Rain: Making The Film

Close Up

Total Excess: How Carolco Changed Hollywood

Rob Reiner – Scenes from a Life

Declaration of Independence

Richard Attenborough: A Life in Film

Adam at Six A.M.

Inside Traffic: The Making of 'Traffic'

Michael Douglas: The Prodigal Son

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

The China Syndrome: Creating a Controversy

Ben-Hur: The Epic That Changed Cinema

Hassles and Hangups

A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once upon a time on Wall Street

Once Upon a Time… One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

In Search of Peace

Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Tell Them Who You Are

When Michael Calls

The Streets of San Francisco

The China Syndrome: A Fusion of Talent

Deauville et le rêve américain
